Challenges Facing Social Economists in the Twenty-First Century: An Institutionalist Perspective

Abstract

Introduction Welcome to the Association for Social Economics In 1970, the Catholic Economics Association changed its name to the Association for Social Economics. The Association's doors were opened wide to all social economists, and soon many Institutionalists joined the association, including me. We were welcomed with friendship and scholarly support. Nearly a quarter of a century later, institutional economists have been successfully blended into the Association for Social Economics, and the blend was made without damage to the honorable Catholic heritage of the Association. Whether one is an institutionalist or whatever, becoming a social economist still means believing that economics i a moral science. (For more on the moral science see Cochran.) This blending was quite an accomplishment, for Institutionalists are a cantankerous lot and are quick to disagree even among themselves. Furthermore, this accomplishment demonstrated that the association and the research and scholarship its members generate are adaptable and open. Adaptability and openness, along with the continued faith that economics is a moral science, will carry the relevance of Social Economics far into the twenty-first century and, surely, beyond it as well. Perhaps the next century will be the century of the Social Economist. I hope so. To make it so, Social Economics must preserve its core strengths while expanding to meet the challenges of the next century. The Core Strengths of Social Economics The core strengths of Social Economics begin with its adaptability and openness As Mark A. Lutz ruminated, |S~ocial economics is not so much a school of thought as it is an applied discipline studying certain questions (e.g., the valuation process) comparable to, let us say, the history of economic thought. Nothing precludes practitioner from approaching their specialized subject in a highly pluralistic manner . . . (Lutz, 1990, p. 433). So the house of Social Economics is a very spacious one, and its inhabitants ar friendly and open. But Social Economics does not include everyone. Instead, Social Economists are a rather special breed who study the problems of the disadvantaged and propose solutions to those problems. They are not just friendly and open folks, but socially concerned folks as well. And Social Economics is a rather special discipline. It is a value-directed, ameliorative, and holistic economics (Dugger, 1977). It is economics practiced as a moral science (Cochran, 1974). It is economics with values playing a central role in the inquiry. In Social Economics, economics practiced as a moral science, values matter in four senses. First, values matter to Social Economists as concerned individuals whose values help them chose what problems to investigate and what solutions to advocate. We do not simply wander about the field of economics in search of som bone to chew on or rock to look under. We are not puppies who have been taken t the farm for a romp In the barnyard. Instead, our values give direction and meaning to our inquiries. We are value-directed, which is not the same thing as value-biased. Values bias inquiry when they remain implicit and unexamined. Values direct inquiry when they are explicit and examined. Second, values matter to Social Economics as an empirical discipline. In Social Economics as an empirical discipline, it is fully recognized that people have values and that those values affect how they act. So, an explanation of human action must account for human values--how they are formed, how they change, and what difference they make. Values cannot be exogenous in Social Economics. That is, we cannot just assume certain consumer tastes or utility functions and proceed from there to work out the logic of constrained maximization. Such an approach does not explain human action because it leaves out why people act. They act to fulfill values. So values must be made endogenous to the inquiry. …